I just want to quickly describe a job I cracked out on the side the other week. A friend of mine had a client who was in need of a website in a hurry because an ad was booked to run on a local radio station within days and there was no site yet for customers to go to.
The website was fairly straightforward: a customer fills out the form to sign up for a series of weight loss events or request updates about upcoming events, and someone logs into the administration system to administer to the registrations, call clients if requested, and create/edit events.
I coded the system fairly quickly with the assistance of the Code Igniter framework. All in all, the whole project took me about 20 hours. You can observe the results here or the front end anyway. (edit: the customer has since changed some aspects of the site)
Not long ago I read an interesting article at lifehacker which described a method Jerry Seinfeld uses to stay motivated.
Basically the idea is this: To become good at something you need to do it over and over again. Practice makes perfect. To help motivate yourself to practice a skill every single day, mount a single page calendar displaying a full year on a wall. Every day you accomplish whatever goal you set yourself, circle that day on the calendar with a big red pen. After a week or two a nice chain starts to form. Your only job is to not break that chain. You must love that chain, and be super careful not to break it. As the chain lengthens, so does the desire not to break the chain.
I really like this idea and have been wanting to try it out for a while. There are some tools out there that will help you do this, like this one that will integrate nicely with your iGoogle home page. However, when it comes to organization I work better with non-digital tools. Being so late in the year I don’t want to buy a poster so I quickly made up an a4 calendar which you can download here.
If I feel the system is worthwhile I might make up another nicer calendar for 2009!
Having gained the reputation as one of the web’s best loved JavaScript libraries, jQuery is reaping the benefits of widespread recognition and adoption by seriously heavy online players such as google, Digg, and Mozilla. If you haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon, now is a great time to do so. Learning jQuery is a book that aims to take you step by step from budding JavaScripter to client-side scripting guru. The book assumes that the reader has ‘the basics of HTML and CSS, and should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript’.
The beginning of the book makes no assumptions about the reader other than those stated, and explains the technology thoroughly, from basics such as DOM manipulation and selectors moving quite quickly into more advanced techniques. As you get into the book you quickly fall in love with the ease and simplicity with which you can accomplish complicated tasks by simply chaining together simple methods.
The book’s authors, Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg, know this stuff backwards and teach with authority and attention to detail. There is nothing much in the book you couldn’t find online for free if you are willing to hunt around, but if you really need a start-to-finish paper copy then you will likely find a great deal to learn between the covers of this book.
I finally worked out (hopefully) the intricacies of working with the blog back-end so that the navigation bar works intuitively in the non-post pages, bringing the theme to a fairly completed stage. I now have no reason not to use it, so here it is.
Notes on the design
I wanted to create a minimal design for the blog which used only typographical elements for the layout. So no images and no ‘boxing in’ the content.
I had a number of ideas, all centered around different ways of displaying information relevant to the author of the blog. Only one really stuck: Focusing attention on the chronology of the content
With the calendar navigation bar you can tell how long ago the an article was posted, and how consistantly the author posts, the frequency of posts in a given period of time, and how long the blog has been active/inactive, with just a few clicks. This might prove to be a good incentive to write more often 
I have hosted the first development version of my future blog design here.
It’s currently far from finished code wise, but the design only needs a few more typographical details and a bit of a cleanup. The Javascript navigation bar may require a refresh if you are on a slower connection, which is a problem I will have to fix in the next version.
Recently I finished the website for the business I have spent the last year creating: GrowthGraph. The website was a simple enough affair, designed in Illustrator and coded from scratch using code igniter, including the checkout process.
The website was designed to be clean, simple, appealing, and to fit nicely with the overall look an feel of the business.
So at the moment I’m busy tooling with a website layout for this blog, and it has been taking a lot of my spare time. The good news is that it is nearly done, near enough anyway, and should be up within the next few days (cross fingers). I have however been neglecting my blog, and it’s been sitting with one post for quite a while now.
Over the next few days I will be uploading some of my favourite uni projects, and the first in the series is my advanced animation project from third year.
The project was to create a thirty second animation. With unlimited scope as to what medium, style, and subject to use, I decided to make a mash-up of several different styles of animation including stop motion, 3d and 2d.
stills from the project
I used a whole bunch of different technologies to create the effects, including:
- Photoshop - texturing, batch effects, and general editing
- Flash - 2d animation
- 3ds Max - the room, the bear
- Some fractal program - the fractal projection
- Final Cut - editing
I uploaded the animation to youtube so check it out here.
I am starting to put together a design toolbox, or a collection of templates, starting points, inspiration, icons, and anything else that will help streamline my design process. As I expand my toolbox over time I will occasionally post anything that I think might be useful or interesting.
My first addition is a vector implementation of the web design Starter kit from quommunication.
Download the Inkscape Starter Kit
The kit includes:
- Basic Grid Layout
- 1024 Browser Window
- 1280 Browser Window
- HTML elements
- Standard advertising box sizes
- Swatch Panel
- Images panel
The zip file contains an svg file for use with inkscape (my tool of choice for web design), and a folder containing all the linked image files.
